Ἔῤῥει πᾶσ’ Ἀφροδίτα.
There was “no speculation in those eyes.” The eyes were not painted certainly; as the poet saw the statues in his mind’s eye, so had he seen them with his visible organs. The charm of love was not in them, because the outward form of the eye was only represented in the marble. The love-charm was not in those “vacancies of eyes.” Schütz has this note upon the passage: “Quamvis nimirum eleganter fabricatæ sint statuæ, carent tamen oculis, adeoque admirationem quidem excitare possunt amorem non item.”
These lines of the poet Æschylus, repeated before an acute and critical Athenian audience, would have been unintelligible, and marked as an egregious blunder, if the practice of painting statues, or even their eyes alone, had been so universal as it is represented in this “Apology.” Can there be a more decisive authority, than this of the contemporary Æschylus? It is certainly a descent from Æschylus to Virgil; but we follow the apologist.
“Marmoreusque tibi, Dea, versicoloribus alis
In morem pictâ stabit Amor pharetrâ.”
The writer, by his italics, is, we think, a little out in grammar, connecting “in morem” (because it was customary) with “versicoloribus alis,”—and in his translated sense of the passage, with “pictâ pharetrâ” also. This is certainly making nothing of it, by endeavouring to make the most of it. “In morem” may more properly attach itself to “stabit;” if not, to the wings or painted quiver,—not, in construction, to both; at any rate, Virgil, though Heyne reproves him for his bad taste, had here a prejudice in favour of marble, for “Amor” shall be marble—that is the first word, and first consideration. In the next quotation Virgil, as provokingly, sets his heart upon marble—nay, smooth polished marble—and the whole figure is to be entirely of this smooth marble; but he gratifies Mr Jones by “scarlet”—the colour of colours, vermilion—and thus so reconciles the Polychromatist to the marble, as to induce him to quote the really worthless passage:—
“Si proprium hoc fuerit, levi de marmore tota
Puniceo stabis suras evincta cothurno.”
It is not of much moment to the main question what statue one clown should offer to Diana, in return for a day’s hunting, or the other to a very different and far less respectable deity, whom he has already made in vulgar marble, pro temp. only, and whom he promises to set up in gold, though simply the “custos pauperis horti.”
“Nunc te marmoreum pro tempore fecimus; at tu